No Rules!

Is Le Fooding, the French culinary movement, more than a feeling?

A form of culinary Futurism, Fooding wants the table to move as fast as modern life.Credit ANNETTE MARNAT

I suppose I would have an easier time deciding if the Paris-based French food-guide-and-festival group that calls itself Le Fooding is going to be able to accomplish all that it has set out to accomplish—which seems to be nothing less than to save the preëminence of French cuisine from going the way of the Roman Empire, the five-act tragedy, and the ocean liner—if I had an easier time defining what it is and truly hopes to do. That it is a phenomenon is beyond dispute, its success having reached the point where the French daily Figaro announced, last summer, that French food is now divided into two families, each with its own public and cultural identity: “On the one side, Michelin, with its century of cultural expertise; on the other the Fooding guide, born ten years ago in an attempt to break the codes and finally offer real change to a gastronomy that its authors judge to be outdated.”

Yet what, exactly, the new family stands for can be hard to say. At some moments, Le Fooding seems earnest, in the manner of the Slow Food movement; at others, it is merely festive, a good-time gang; at still others, it appears determined to wrench the entire culture of good food in France from its historic place, on the nationalist right, to a new home, in the libertarian center. To spend a few months studying its founders and their ideas is to get pretty much the same feeling you get when, studying French history, you have to take up the story of Jansenism at Port-Royal in the seventeenth century: all you can really figure out is that it’s important, that it’s a heresy, and that it’s hard to follow.

The Fooding restaurant guide is the most obvious of the group’s activities. Since its founding, in 2000, by Alexandre Cammas and Emmanuel Rubin, two gastronomic journalists exasperated by the conformity and conservatism of French food culture, Le Fooding has published, from its Right Bank offices, a handsome, atypically larksome, and unusually honest annual encyclopedia of the restaurants and bistros of both Paris and the provinces. (The guide boasts on its cover that its writers pay their own checks and can prove it—not a thing universally true of French food guides.) But the guide is, in a sense, merely the word, not the act, of the enterprise. The movement, which has been reinforced over the years by a constantly changing team of other Fooding-istes, also sponsors mass picnics—“Foodings”!—at which three-star French chefs, long separated from their diners by a kitchen door and centuries of decorum, offer good food in casual, high-spirited settings. These Foodings take place all over France; the atmosphere is somewhere between a buffet dinner and the Woodstock festival.

Le Fooding is in part a move to épater la bourgeoisie—it was at a Fooding event that the young chef Petter Nilsson famously assembled a plate of vegetables that symbolized the world’s religions, with a giant frite in the shape of a cross on top—but it has also been accused, by left-wing journalists, of representing the bourgeoisie; the populist left-wing magazine Marianne charged that it was a kind of cosmopolitan fifth column in the continuing modern assault on French values, and Emmanuel Rubin left the movement last year, disillusioned by what he considered its loss of moral mission.

I first heard about Le Fooding in an e-mail from Raphaël Glucksmann, the filmmaker and human-rights activist (and the son of the philosopher André Glucksmann). “For once, I’m not writing on behalf of the Chechens, the Rwandans, or the Georgians,” he explained cheerfully, and then urged me to meet with his friend Zoe Reyners, who was coming to New York as a kind of avant-garde of the Fooding movement here. Zoe turned out to be an exquisite, nervous blonde in white linen, with a distinct resemblance to the young Brigitte Fossey, and she explained that Le Fooding was planning to come to New York for its first American event, a marriage of art, food, and festival that would be called “Le Fooding d’Amour” and would take place on the grounds of P.S. 1, creating a kind of Lafayette-Washington moment in Queens. The best of the new generation of French chefs were flying in to meet the best of the new generation of Americans and cook alongside them. She gave me a copy of the latest Fooding guide, which was illustrated by the young cartoonists who bring so much life these days to French journalism. The cover showed King Kong ripping the dome from a Haussmannian restaurant palace with a look of utter satisfaction as he eats the bourgeois diners inside with an enormous silver spoon. The tone of the reviewing had a jocose quality quite new in France: the section on three-star-style temples was called “Fais-Moi Mal!”—literally, “Make Me Ache!,” or, idiomatically, “Hurt Me!” Zoe asked if I’d like to meet Alexandre Cammas, who was arriving in New York the following month for an extended reconnaissance of the new world. “He will be taking a house in Brooklyn, with his family, in order to lay the groundwork for American Fooding,” she said.

I met Alexandre, with Zoe, in Bryant Park; he turned out to be the Danton of the Fooding movement, one of those passionately articulate young Frenchmen who speak with the relentless eloquence of French letters and philosophy, answering each rhetorical question as they raise it. “Fooding?” he said. “I was writing for the magazine Nova, and I needed a rhyme for the title of a piece.” We had now settled on a bench. “I intended the word as a mélange of ‘food’ and ‘feeling’—and I like the provocation of using an English word within the context of French cuisine,” he explained. “I was already a food writer—I had been at Libération for a while—and this was in 1999, a time when restaurants in France were already beginning to move, to change. There was a new element of design, a new element of casual yet serious food. The old choice between la cuisine de bistrot and la grande cuisine française was ending.

“I wasn’t, in the beginning, trying to do anything except characterize a little phenomenon—but I found it growing, in response to a new need.” He cleared his throat and leaned forward, like one who needs to resolve complexities that his innocent listener hasn’t even grasped yet. “What does it mean, the Fooding movement?” he went on. “Food and feeling—that’s the heart of it. But with what practical effect? ‘Feeling’ in the sense that we mean to be part of le goût de son temps—the taste of one’s time, though ‘taste’ in English is too weak a word. ‘Fooding’ means to eat and drink with feeling—to recognize that one eats with the nose, the eyes, and the mouth, with everything that makes us human! At the time we began, French culinary journalism was narrowly focussed on the cooking of the kidneys, the tenderness of the poularde. What was on the plate was all that counted! But who lives that way? Who eats that way? We wanted cooks who cooked with the whole of their selves and souls, not technicians of the table. French cuisine was caught in a museum culture: the dictatorship of a fossilized idea of gastronomy. And this dictatorship has been enforced by tourism: you have tourists packing in to experience gastronomy in a kind of perpetual museum of edification. We wanted to be outside that, sur le pont, on the bridge, in front, defining everything that is new. We wanted to escape—foie gras, volaille de bresse, all the clichés.”

He caught himself, bad-mouthing foie gras being a bit like bad-mouthing the Communion wafer: “Not that we have anything against it—we adore foie gras, and who doesn’t love poulet de bresse? But all this style that had been mechanically copied over and over—it’s not living cuisine. In a living cuisine, things move and mix together, and that’s what makes the cuisine of tomorrow. The classic French cuisine was dying. Everyone knew it outside of France, but it had to be said within. And it had to be said with joy—not as something to mourn but as something to celebrate, the beginning of a new taste of one’s time.”

Alexandre and Zoe went on to explain that the movement first made its mark with the publication of the guide, which immediately became notorious for ignoring some great names, like the restaurateur Guy Savoy, and honoring such masters as Alain Ducasse for their casual fusion places rather than for their grand restaurants. “We left out Guy Savoy not because he is not a fine cook but because he was adding nothing new,” Alexandre explained. “We want food to be a series of provocations, not mechanical pleasures. Food must belong to its time.”

I asked Zoe and Alexandre whom they would include on their list of Fooding chefs in Paris, and wondered if I might have lunch at a Fooding restaurant with a Fooding guru the next time I was in town. Zoe mentioned a few places, including Stéphane Jégo’s L’Ami Jean, a small Basque bistro in the Seventh Arrondissement; Yves Camdeborde’s Le Comptoir, a twenty-seat dining room in the Hotel Relais Saint-Germain; and Bruno Doucet’s La Régalade, a bistro out near the Porte de Châtillon.

Both Zoe and Alexandre had the warm glow of revolutionary sectarians in their eyes, and, having felt the same fond exasperation with the stasis of French cooking, I was inspired. At the same time, their desire for a head-to-toe, well-articulated renewal of French cuisine, complete with a guide and an advance guard of agitators, seemed a peculiarly calculated way of achieving increased spontaneity. The systematic, thought-through approach to a renaissance in casualness might itself be a symptom of the problem, it occurred to me, as though they were saying to one another, If only we could persuade our countrymen to stop being so entirely French, we could persuade them to be entirely French.

When I got to Paris, I realized that I had heard some of this before: American critics had been complaining for a while that French cooking, which had led the world in the idea that food might be art, had become stereotyped, unreal, and remote from life, and the complaint had at moments echoed in France. Doing some research in the French papers, I discovered the same puzzlement that I had about Le Fooding. One magazine interviewer commented to Cammas and Rubin, “I don’t see what, exactly, in Le Fooding is revolutionary or even original—you’re searching for good little restaurants that aren’t too expensive. Where’s the novelty in that?” For that matter, a similar complaint about the conservatism of French cooking was at the heart of the nouvelle-cuisine revolution, back in the seventies; its version of the Fooding guide was the Gault Millau guide.

Nor were the cooks who were being touted by Le Fooding for challenging the paradigm in any real way revolutionary. Le Comptoir, La Régalade—perfectly nice places, but not wildly imaginative. And, anyway, it seemed to me, now that I was in Paris, that the new crisis in cooking looked about the same as the old—wonderful food, wonderful rooms, all passé by New York or London standards—and, surely, if the same crisis continues for decades it is no longer a crisis but merely a condition. The real absence in France was not of good food but of what might be called think food—places like El Bulli, on the Costa Brava, or like Fergus Henderson’s St. John, in London, where the food is devoted to an idea, whether of molecular transformations or of whole-beast eating. And, past a certain point, I realized that the absence of think food was not an absence that truly, in my heart, I regretted. Not everything has to evolve. There are enough ideas in life without having them all on your plate.

Nonetheless, I decided to continue my research. Another member of the Fooding team, Marine Bidaud, met me for lunch at L’Ami Jean, on a quiet side street near the Eiffel Tower. Where Zoe had been an embodiment of fifties French beauty, elegant and tense, Marine was more in the line of the young Bardot. She coolly explained that her values derived from her upbringing in the South of France, where her family still gathered around the table, and that she loved L’Ami Jean because it put her in mind of that tradition. She turned out to be an ex-art historian, who had done research on, among other things, Courbet’s great gynecological picture, “The Origin of the World.” I picked at the charcuterie as we spoke. (I once pressed Alexandre about the astonishing glamour of the Fooding-istes, and he admitted that it was somewhat purposeful to have a staff that gave eating a more alluring aura than was always the norm in France—young men and women, rather than old men with napkins tucked under their chins.)

Stéphane Jégo, the chef at L’Ami Jean, had a black eye that day—the prize of a rugby fight—but his food was wonderful: varied and intelligent, and full of southwestern folk charm: slow-cooked veal shin, tender without being mushy and comforting without being dull; the usual foie gras, but here more buttery than bland; and the best rice-pudding dessert I have ever had, complete with black-cherry confit. I hadn’t had a better meal in Paris in a long time. But was it a new frontier? Could you build a revolution on rice pudding, even great rice pudding? “We need to change, we need to move,” Marine said, but the movement seemed to be movement within the same familiar thing.

Change we can eat. . . . The Western world has been filled with food-reform movements in the past twenty years. Slow Food, the Edible Schoolyard, the various vegetarian and ethical movements sprung by the likes of Peter Singer—in no other time would a highly regarded young novelist like Jonathan Safran Foer view a book about the anti-animal-eating movement as a necessary extension of his oeuvre, the way a novelist in the sixties might have felt obliged to write a book about the antiwar movement. This proves, depending on your point of view, either that the reform of food has become essential to the reform of life or that, failing in the reform of life, we reform our food instead. Yet all these movements—vegan and whole beast, localist and seasonalist—share a sense that the industrialized, Americanized food economy is destructive of small-scale, European, traditional, farm-based eating.

What distinguishes Le Fooding, I was beginning to understand, was that it is, in effect, against an overly European, tradition-minded approach to food. Slow is the last thing it wants French cooking to be, French cooking being slow enough already. The goal of the Fooding movement is to break down French snobbery, in the form of its hidebound hypersensitive discrimination, while the goal of the slow-food movement, though not put quite this way, is to build up hidebound hyper-discrimination. Fooding is a form of culinary Futurism: it wants the table to move as fast as modern life. (And, indeed, the Italian Futurists were obsessed with food, and wrote their own cookbook.) The Fooding guide is open to pizzerias; Alexandre says that it is even open to fast food, in the right time and the right place. Although McDonald’s and the like are not included in the guide, Alexandre has admitted to a certain affection for the Chipotle Mexican Grill, and can recall a welcome meal at a McDonald’s in the Carpathian Mountains.

When I pressed Alexandre about the difference between the nouvelle-cuisine revolution in the seventies and the Fooding revolution, he had no difficulty defining it. “Nouvelle cuisine manifested itself in terms of rules,” he said. “Its practitioners rejected the old rules but had rules of their own: instead of too much butter, no butter at all. They replaced the norms with other norms. We’re for liberty, for the end of categories—a good meal is a rich experience, of any sort. They said no butter. We say no rules! No rules save excellence.” He looked grave. “And another thing. Nouvelle cuisine was largely cut off from the changes in the society going on around it. It was a palace revolution. We want a cuisine of this time that is in harmony with this time. The philosophy of food in France has always bent toward the right, sometimes the extreme right—Christian Millau and Henri Gault both came from right-wing backgrounds. I find that the posture of Le Fooding can be replayed in politics, but in a different key. Not Sarkozy, but Cohn-Bendit. A new openness. An end to false boundaries between peoples, as between brasseries, bistros, grands restaurants, and the like. All that matters is talent.”

In America and England, you are what you think about eating. Tell me where you stand on Michelle Obama’s organic White House garden and (with the exception of a handful of “Crunchy Cons” and another handful of grumpy left-wing nostalgists for whiskey and cigarettes) I can tell what the rest of your politics are. People who are in favor of a new approach to food—even if that approach involves a return to heritage breeds and discarded farming methods—are in favor of a new approach to social life. But in France the philosophy of food does not break on such neat party lines. Many reactionary traditionalists today cluster on the left, while some of those most open to reform are on the right. (Of course, those on the left think that what those on the right call reform is not reform at all but merely ruination.) Alexandre, who says that he now regrets his vote for the centrist François Bayrou in the last Presidential election, cannot, as a rule, count on a reliable base of supporters, which may be why Le Fooding constantly needs to whip up new bases at its events. The politics of food in France cuts haphazardly and unpredictably across party lines and allegiances; tell me what you think about eating, and I will tell you only that you are French.

And yet there was enough to bring a handful of those new-old French cooks to P.S. 1, for “Le Fooding d’Amour.” Organized by a new executive at Le Fooding named Anna Polonsky, a young Anouk Aimée as rendered by Modigliani, it had induced Yves Camdeborde and Stéphane Jégo, the twin princes of the French movement, to make the trip, and several fashionable New York cooks—among them Lee Hanson, of Minetta Tavern, and David Chang, of Momofuku—came, too. There was a belly dancer, and wandering musicians, and long lines at the food tables; Stéphane Jégo’s slow-cooked lamb, braised for twenty-four hours, was, like his Paris veal shin, particularly memorable, as, in another way, were the mini-burgers from Minetta.

I sought out Yves Camdeborde, and he spoke intently about his commitment to Fooding as a movement. “If we don’t do this, we’re against the wall,” he began. “The Michelin-guide approach is dead. I worked at the grandes maisons, at the Crillon. They look at the rug, and they measure the chandeliers. We’ll go right into a wall if we continue this way. What can it mean? Two stars? Three stars? Who cares?” His tone was not angry, or indignant. He simply looked over at the tables of the American chefs, passing out mini-burgers as lines grew ever longer. “It’s more than a bistro movement. People say, Bistro, bistro, bistro. But what I do is not bistro—it’s aubergiste.” He looked at me keenly, to make sure I followed the distinction: an auberge is a rural inn. “I’m a kind of urban aubergiste. It’s a cuisine of complexity and high quality—high cooking without pretension. Slow food—slow food is about defending the traditions, the terroirs, the quality of products. It’s about producers. This movement is about consumers: about remaking the clientele. It’s a way of increasing the spontaneity of things.”

As Camdeborde said that, I suddenly saw the right analogy: Le Fooding was to cooking what the New Wave was to French cinema. The hidden goal was to Americanize French food without becoming American, just as the New Wave, back in the fifties and sixties, was about taking in Hollywood virtues without being Hollywoodized—taking in some of the energy and optimism and informality that the French still associate with American movies while reimagining them as something distinctly French. It had a similar cast of characters, with Cammas as André Bazin, the propagandist; Rubin as the anathematized Eric Rohmer; Jégo as Truffaut, the humanist-revolutionary; and Camdeborde as Godard, the serious radical. Like the New Wave filmmakers, they had a vague sense of what they wanted, combined with a vigorous determination to achieve it, whatever the hell it was. Both were movements to remake French audiences in the light of American attitudes—to refashion their expectations as much as to create a new kind of object. The idea was that we had to change taste in order to change art. Appreciating old movies in a new way was as much a part of the legacy of the New Wave as making new ones. Eating with a new attitude was as important to Le Fooding as actually eating something new. The creative act in cooking was to change the style of criticism.

The morning after the Fooding event in Queens, I submitted this analogy to Alexandre during a walk, and he allowed that there might be something in it. He was shining with delight at the success of the launch, and was already making plans for new campaigns in France and America. He told me that he had begun work on a bande dessinée—France is a place where the adult comic book is a major vehicle for communicating information and emotion—that would expose the history of clandestine right-wing propaganda in French food writing. (It’s true that French food writing has tended to be reactionary; the most famous French food writer of the past century, Robert Courtine, was revealed to have been an active anti-Semitic collaborator with the Vichy regime.) Alexandre goes farther. Even Brillat-Savarin’s famous definition of gastronomy’s aim—to regulate and fix limits for appetite—is, he thinks, touched by a panicky need for control. “Think how we would feel if we used the same words for the study of sex!” he exclaimed. “To regulate and fix the limits of it! Our role is to work against that tradition: to open minds, to reveal history, to change views. It should be a movement of the young.”

The most recent Fooding guide is in a way the most provocative. Nearly all the Michelin three-star restaurants have been dropped completely, there are passages in English, and, most important, a couple of new chefs have been identified who can fairly be called revolutionary: Adeline Grattard, of Yam’Tcha, on the Rue Sauval, who has invented a Sino-French fusion cuisine rooted largely in steaming and teas; and, still more revolutionary, Gregory Marchand, a young Frenchman who trained in New York and London—an unthinkable notion twenty years ago—and who actually calls his restaurant, on the Rue du Nil, Frenchie. The next Fooding event in New York is promised for September, but, instead of being once again a Franco-American conversation, it will be a match, even a confrontation, between San Francisco and New York chefs. “We don’t want to be narrowly identified as a ‘Franco-Français’ movement, just bringing French chefs to America,” Anna confided recently. “Then we might as well be part of the French cultural ministry.”

Alexandre is particularly glad to be coming back to New York. “I grew up watching American movies,” he said the morning after the Fooding event in Queens. “America still feels so young to me. I love New York. I still see things like Momofuku that are entirely of New York. Can we make that kind of place in France?” He mused for a moment, and then brightened.

“Do you know a film I love?” he asked. “ ‘Tarzan’s New York Adventure.’ Do you know it? With Johnny Weissmuller? And that scene when he leaps from the Brooklyn Bridge?” His hand moved through the air, Tarzan jumping from the bridge. “I love that moment. It’s an important moment for me. It seems so, so romantic.” ♦

Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986.